


Turn Away

by strangestquiet



Category: Persona 4
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-26
Updated: 2010-04-26
Packaged: 2017-10-09 04:32:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/83086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangestquiet/pseuds/strangestquiet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Souji dies in battle, a mourning Yosuke must decide whether he will take his place as leader.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Turn Away

**Author's Note:**

> This piece:  
> \- is also doujinshified, which you can find [here](http://turnaway.comicgen.com)!  
> \- has an incredible follow-up in the form of [Reach Out](http://archiveofourown.org/works/83403), written by Chisotahn. Go! Read!

“Seta’s not here again today?”

Yosuke tenses when the whispers start, but he keeps his head down, headphones jammed over his ears even though his player is out of batteries, and pretends not to hear.

“I heard nobody’s seen him in a week.”

“No way! He never misses school! Do you think it’s that serial killer again?”

“Who knows? Maybe he just had to go back home all of a sudden. Like a family emergency or something. Transfer students just don’t last all that long sometimes, y’know?”

“Aww, I hope he comes back soon. I made him something in Home Ec and it’s just going to rot in his shoe locker if he doesn’t find it! Then he’ll never even think about going out with me.”

“Ha, like us ordinary girls even stand a chance. He’s always hanging around with Yukiko Amagi, and I used to see him leave school with Ai Ebihara all the time. God, what did he see in someone bitchy like her?”

“I know. This one time…”

Their conversation moves on naturally, and the original topic of their concern is abandoned, but Yosuke is still thinking about him. He’s been thinking about him for exactly six days. He is one of seven people who know of his classmate’s location, and the guilt of the knowledge weighs heavy on his heart. The Home Ec girl will be sorely disappointed, he thinks, blankly.

Souji Seta is dead.  


 

 

 

 

\----

 

 

 

_“Senpai? Senpai?! No, get up!”_

Yosuke heard Rise’s voice before he realized what had happened. He barely registered Kanji’s violent dispatch of the last shadow as his eyes swept across the circle he and his friends had formed around their enemy. Yukiko was already running, her face white and terrified, and Souji –

Souji was –

“He’s just … knocked down, right?” he heard Kanji murmur, taking hurried steps forward. His own question was answered as Amaterasu appeared above Yukiko, whose cheeks were already streaked with tears. “Shit – Senpai!”

Only Yosuke couldn’t approach him. He could only watch, arms limp, body frozen, mind numb, as Kanji carefully lifted the bloody, unresponsive body of their friend, and as Yukiko’s efforts to revive him did nothing.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. He was supposed to say something. That’s how it happened in the movies, right? He was supposed to be where Kanji was now, hearing important final words, saying what was bottled up inside him and needed to be said before it was too late. But it was already too late. Souji had lost consciousness before he’d even had time to understand what had happened to him; he had no last words to give.

All of them were Yosuke’s.

\---

He wakes with a start, sees Chie’s worried face in the row ahead of him, and realizes he fell asleep with his head down on his desk. He’s been sleeping poorly since it happened. They all have. Yukiko’s head is bowed too, and Yosuke thinks for the briefest of moments about how difficult it must be for Chie right now, stuck in the row between theirs, having to look after and worry for both of them. It’s the first time he’s really asked himself how someone _else_ might be feeling, and a tremor of guilt disturbs his stomach.

He excuses himself when the lunch bell rings, heads straight for the bathroom. Crouches over the toilet with a hand clasped over his mouth, but he can’t make himself throw up. It was almost easier, in the first couple of days, when any kind of food he managed to ingest would vacate his stomach within an hour. That was grief. Now the minutes stretched out forever, eyes seemed to follow him wherever he went, and this was grief mixed heavily with guilt. Guilt because he had let his best friend die.

Guilt that they couldn’t tell _anyone_ where he was.

\---

_“Wh-what do you mean, leave him here?!”_

“Rise,” Naoto said quietly, calmly, despite the clearly-audible strain in her voice. “Please, think this through. We can’t take him out through the TV – think of where we’ll end up!”

“In Junes…” Chie’s eyes were red and bleary, her nose stuffed up. “Oh my God, Naoto-kun’s right… We can’t take him home!”

“Like hell we’re leavin’ him here!” Kanji didn’t seem to notice or care that he was yelling at Naoto. “Just let him rot in here with the shadows?! No fucking way!"

"Don't worry about the shadows," Teddie said quietly. "I'll stay here with Sensei until - until he..."

_“Until he what?!” Yukiko was sobbing, her glasses discarded, her long hair in disarray. “Until he shows up dead and hung up in someone’s antenna? Just like the others?!”_

“Yukiko-senpai, we don’t have a choice…!”

Yosuke felt their eyes fall on him, and it took a long moment before he understood why. He and Souji had been together since the beginning of all this; out of all of them, he had been the closest to him. His opinion mattered. No, not just that … they needed someone to make the call, because they were all used to taking orders, and the person who was used to giving them was –

“We have to leave him.” His voice sounded very far away to his own ears, and it wasn’t until that moment that he couldn’t hold back the tears anymore.

\---

His hand pauses on the bathroom door just as he’s about to push it open and head back out into the hallway. There are voices on the other side that still him.

“Did you hear them talking about it this morning?”

“About Seta? Yeah. Geez, like they know anything about it.”

“What if it really is another murder, though?”

“Seta was living with that detective, too. If _he_ wasn’t safe, the rest of us are screwed!”

“His friends don’t seem to be doing too well. Hanamura fell asleep in class this morning.”

“Well, what do you expect? He and Seta were like, best friends.”

“You really think that’s all?”

“…Wait, what’s that supposed to mean?”

Yosuke feels his stomach lurch again. He might need the toilet after all. But he doesn’t return to the stall this time, just turns so that his back is against the wall adjacent to the bathroom door, and slowly lets himself slide down until he’s sitting on the floor with his head down on his knees.

“They were like, _always_ together. Like, way more than normal. And this girl in third year swears she saw them hugging or something at the riverbed this one time.”

“Wow, I had no idea! First Konishi-senpai, now Seta… I feel really bad for Hanamura…”

“Yeah…”

He can’t bring himself to return to class at all that afternoon. He spends a long time in the bathroom until he finally heaves up his breakfast, and then the nurse sends him home when he shows up in her office. Does he look that terrible? Nobody says a word to him as he leaves school, just lets him do what he likes. Maybe this is what Saki’s brother feels like all the time.

\---

_He had a dream, the night after it happened. There was a woman, and a man with a long nose, and everything was the deepest shade of blue, from their clothing down to the plush limousine seats. He didn’t recall what was said, but something intrinsic about it reminded him deeply of Souji._

He awoke calmly, eyes fixed on the ceiling of his bedroom, one brief reprieve from despair. This couldn’t end them. They needed to avenge their leader. He hadn’t been killed like the others had been killed, but it was still the fault of the murderer that they were inside the TV in the first place. If they didn’t finish this, if they didn’t make him pay, all of this was for nothing, and Souji had thrown his life away in vain.

But in the morning, his body quaked with fear, and he couldn’t recall why he’d been so adamant.

\---

Yosuke’s good at deceiving himself, so he manages to believe it when the clock strikes midnight and he tells himself that the reason he wants to go for a walk in the dense fog is to help him sleep. He slips on his coat and shoes, and leaves his house through the back door, cutting across neighbors’ yards and through back streets. He lies, pretends he doesn’t know why he’s heading toward Junes, just lets his feet carry him there without thought.

His cell phone buzzes in his pocket, but he ignores it. He needs to be alone right now. This is his responsibility, his burden, and he isn’t going to let anyone else have it.

He sees him from the ground, but can’t get there from where he is. While there was no way of knowing where the victims had died in relation to where they showed up in town with the fog, he knows that Teddie is keeping Souji in the Entrance Hall, and so the chances of him showing up close to their doorway to that world are high. But Junes is closed at this time of night, inaccessible, and he can’t reach Souji’s body, tangled in the telephone wires on the roof.

His phone buzzes, and he ignores it once more. This is still their time, the only time they’ll have together ever again, and he doesn’t want any interruptions, doesn’t want to have to describe what he’s seeing. He stands there on the sidewalk, neck craned to the sky, and says the words he couldn’t on the day Souji died, or on any day that he had been alive. Says them over and over like a mantra: _I need you. I love you._

I’m sorry.

The others find him eventually – they, too, have been waiting for this moment, and they cry together in the street, let out all the pain they’ve been holding close to their chests for the last week. They have to disperse before someone sees them there, holding vigil for a hanged body, but when he goes home, sleep comes to him just a little easier than before.

\---

_“I feel kinda bad keeping this from everyone, partner…”_

“Me too. You want to tell them, or should I?”

“Wait, I didn’t say I wanna tell_ them. Are you kidding me?! I would never, ever, ever hear the end of it from Kanji.”_

“That’s a shame. Sometimes I just want to do this…” he stole a kiss, the briefest touch of lips, and pulled away quickly, “before we head off to fight, and it’s going to come as something of a shock if I do it in front of everybody without telling them first.”

His felt his cheeks redden. “So don’t do it!”

“But it’s good luck.” Another one. “Helps remind me I’ve got something to come back to, y’know?”

“Would you stop that? They’re going to be here soon.”

Souji smirked, but put some distance between them to appease him. “Hana-chan’s so shy…”

“Oh my God. Do not call me that again.”

Souji leaned in for one last kiss, but Yosuke turned his head away as he saw Chie and Yukiko approaching from the other end of the food court. “Careful, idiot, they’re here!”

The others quickly joined up with them, and then they were ready to head into the TV world for another afternoon of training. In retrospect, if given the chance to go back, Yosuke would have let Souji kiss him that third time - the last time he would ever do so.

\---

The funeral is held in the city – his parents come home from overseas, of course, and his friends and family from Inaba have to make the trip there. It’s a long way, and expensive, but they need this. They take the train with Dojima and Nanako, and don’t say much the entire trip.

His parents are surprised that he’s made so many friends in so little time, and although they’re strangers, they support each other. Dojima makes the necessary introductions. Although there’s a casket for the wake, he’s going to be cremated, and they bring things of his with them to put in the casket to be burned along with him – Chie brings him the wristbands she gave him, Yukiko brings the charm. Yosuke feels silly when he places down the bandage he’d given him after their fight, but it’s important to them, the most important thing they’d shared. And so forth. Only his family stays for the cremation, so before they know it they’re on their way back to Inaba without the Dojimas, and they talk a little about what they’re going to do now.

They’re in agreement – they have to go on. There’s a brief moment when Yosuke thinks that Naoto is probably going to speak up and become their natural leader, but it doesn’t happen.

“I’ll do it,” he says, and he goes back to watching the countryside speed past the window. “I owe it to him.”

“I think Senpai would have wanted it that way as well,” says Naoto, and the others make noises of approval.

The guilt never really goes away, but he learns to live with it, learns to work through it. The feeling has become so intricately entwined with his final memories of Souji that forgetting it is no longer an option, not if the price is forgetting about him as well. They have work to do, and he wants to be able to say, “We did it, partner” when he sees Souji again, wants to see him proud of what they’ve all accomplished together.

He knows the pain of turning away now, and he swears to himself, to his friends, and above all to Souji, that he won’t do it again.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Reach Out](https://archiveofourown.org/works/83403) by [Chisotahn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chisotahn/pseuds/Chisotahn)




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